Windfallen (Foreign Fruit) by Jojo Moyes

Author:Jojo Moyes
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: ePub Bud (www.epubbud.com)
Published: 2013-07-29T06:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

Daisy Parsons had grown up the kind of young woman about whom older people murmur approvingly, “Lovely girl.” And she was lovely; she was a sweet child, with the ringleted blond locks of a Miss Pears model, a ready smile, and a desire to please. She was educated privately, liked by everyone at her school, and worked industriously to pass exams in architecture, art, and design, in which, her tutors said, she had “a good eye.” Into her teens, apart from a brief, unsuccessful experiment with vegetable hair dye, she had done nothing to frighten her parents or leave them sleepless and frantic in the early hours of the morning. Her boyfriends had been few, selective, and generally nice. She had let them go regretfully, usually with some apologetic tears, so that nearly all looked back on her without rancor and most usually as “the one that got away.”

And then Daniel had come: tall, dark, handsome Daniel with his respectable parents (both accountants), Protestant work ethic, and exacting style. The kind of man that made other girls immediately dissatisfied with their own. Daniel had come to protect her just at a time when she was starting to weary of having to look after herself, and both had adapted to their respective roles within the relationship with the contented shimmying of a chicken settling down to roost. Daniel was the driving force in the business, the strong, forthright one. The protector. This freed Daisy up to become her perfect version of herself: beautiful, sweet, sexy, confident in his adoration. A lovely girl. Both saw the perfect vision of themselves reflected in the other’s eyes, and liked it. They rarely argued; there was little need. Besides, neither of them liked the emotional messiness of argument, unless they knew it to be the snappings of foreplay.

Which was why nothing had prepared Daisy for this new life, thrust permanently into a spotlight of disapproval and almost incessantly in dispute—with builders, townspeople, Daniel’s parents—all at a time when she felt most vulnerable and without even her traditional armor of loveliness to fall back on. The plumbers, apparently oblivious to her pleadings, had gone off to work on another job, because they couldn’t start installing the bathrooms until the builders had finished laying the surface over the new septic tank. The builders couldn’t lay the surface, as they were waiting for parts. The suppliers had apparently emigrated. Sylvia Rowan, according to talk, was planning a public meeting to object to the desecration of Arcadia House and the risk to the standards, morals, and general well-being of Merham’s citizens if the work was allowed to continue.

Jones, meanwhile, had called in a cold fury the day after her confrontation in the marketplace and unleashed a verbal torrent on the various ways in which she had already failed to come up to scratch. He could not believe they were already running behind schedule. He could not understand why the supporting beam, when it finally arrived, was the wrong width. He had little faith that they were going to be able to open, as planned, in August.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.